Wouldn't it be nice if the police had a database of all registered firearm owners? if the deputies who paid him a visit had known about the guns....

We, as a society, always look for someone or something to blame. Guns, drugs, various cultures, religions, mental disorders, talking dogs. We always want something to take the blame, but in situations like this, there is no solution. The simple truth is, the boy was evil and his intents were evil. There were many contributing factors, but ultimately, a person is responsible. Not a society, not a culture, not a tool, but a person. We tend to think of evil is something that is removed from us; something that is external and is accessed or applied to us. It is my belief, however, that evil is internal. We want to place blame on an external source, but the simple truth is that it's internal. We can't try to understand why things like this happen. Evil will be a problem as long as mankind exists. We often try to differentiate between "ill" and "evil." It is my belief that we, as humans, are conditioned and trained to (for the most part) restrain our own evil. We try to lock it up, hide it, handcuff it. We are often successful, but we slip up. We, even the "good" among us, do ****ed up stuff sometimes (myself included). We usually realize afterward that something was wrong, regret it, and take steps to avoid it in the future. But sometimes, we produce someone who is broken. Someone whose handcuffs don't work. Then we get what happened Friday night. If you want to call one's failure to repress their own evil an "illness," go ahead. But the illness isn't the problem; it's merely an outlet for our own corruption. We can't adequately answer the "why" question. We're all evil. It is manifested in various forms. Some people are racist. Some are selfish. Some don't take responsibility for their children, others are greedy, cruel, exploitative, or murderous. It's a species problem, not a societal or cultural problem. It's a problem that, personally. I don't believe has a solution.

I'm not discounting the fact that there are legitimate mental illnesses. That's not even in question. I just think it's a discredit and a disservice to those legitimately "ill" to call "evil" a "mental disability." To minimize the profundity or evil by calling it a disease rather than a moral lapse is harmful to our society.

I'm no doctor, no expert, no enlightened mind. I'm just a guy who was doing his job, saw the results of evil, and hope to never see it again.

None of this is to say anything about rape or YesAllWomen or men are *******s or whatever. That's all fine and dandy. I don't know if my reply is on topic or even matters or makes sense. This is basically just a good outlet for me right now. Tirade over.

I have a sudden urge to read Heart of Darkness.

Evil is a word invented by your bosses to describe the things they dislike.

Interesting:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/24/elliot-rodgers-california-shooting-mental-health-misogyny

I've never understood why it is so difficult to get some one who is morbidly obese to start a diet, and exercise. Why is this such an offense? Why is it depressing? I'm overweight (not morbidly obese), and people tell me quite often that I need to loose weight and it doesn't bug me one bit. I don't get irritated, angered, or saddened in the least bit by this friendly advice, which brings me to my next question. I happen to know a good number of people who are morbidly obese and whose lives suck as a direct consequence of their condition, how can I help these people to change their lives?

Set them up on dates with other fat people? IDK.

(can somebody remind me what the issue at hand was here??)

I always find it interesting (read: infuriating) how the media/public outcry about these sort of events is "ban all the guns so mentally ill people can't ever buy/find/borrow/steal one", instead of "actually provide accessible and affordable screening and treatment for those with mental illnesses".

Not really on topic, but okay, I'll offer a few suggestions about how you can change their lives.

• Gene therapy, because adiposity has a high correlation with heredity, so this is probably the best place to start.
• Give them a few million dollars. Obesity is correlated with elevated cortisol levels, and generally career and financial concerns are the greatest contributors to stress.
• Pay for the diagnosis and treatment of obstructive sleep apnea. Often this is as simple as a sleep study and oxygen mask, but sometimes it's an expensive surgery to correct a nasal septum deviation.
• Same, but for gastroesophageal reflux, which not only disrupts sleep but is also implicated in asthma and other pulmonary conditions, which can cause a progressive loss of mobility.
• Convince them that 'low-fat', 'lite', and 'diet' foods are all marketing scams, and they're making them even fatter than if they ate normal food by interfering with their natural sense of satiety.
• Basically convince them to stop eating food entirely. Not because anorexia is effective, but because the ubiquitous agricultural uses of antibiotics and glyphosate have been linked to human obesity.

just a few suggestions, hth

The public has no voice of their own, and the rich people who own media companies don't want to pay for mental health screening or treatment. They blame guns and gun companies because it's safe. NRA and gun nuts are already about as popular as Hitler with the public, and any proposed new regulation is instantly buried for the sake of profit.

It's nonsense to ascribe a singular cause to this action. Even the combination of PUA and mental illness falls far short of the mark. There are probably billions of factors that contributed. I don't understand why everyone is so quick to latch onto a perpetrator's given reason for some action. I know that if I tried to describe the rationale behind my misanthropy, I wouldn't come close to doing the real reasons justice even if I had a whole book.

Humans are inherently rational creators. We like to analyze and split hairs, even when the distinctions we make are meaningless. We are ignorant about essentially 100% of all possible truths in the universe, but the few times we are certain gives us an unwarranted air of confidence.

But yeah, it's probably best to admit that bad **** will continue to be perpetrated against innocent people, and get on with our lives, keeping in mind the small list of things that could be done to possibly decrease the chance of something like this happening (like affordable mental health screening).

Just some random thoughts:

Apparently it's difficult designing a system which protects public safety AND respects privacy and personal freedoms. I think you are always going to end up with a system that works well most of the time but won't stop every act of premeditated violence.

It's easy to point at how easy it is to purchase a gun, and want to make that a more difficult process. It probably should be more difficult. Personally I wouldnt even mind if gun sellers had to operate under the assumption 1st time gun buyers are mentally ill, and must pass a mental evaluation given by a psychologist.

So basically since you don't understand why it happens, it must be a magical force?

No, no, no, no. Evil is not a real thing. It is a superstitious, religious, ideological idea. It is a way for people to think of morality in oversimplified, black-and-white terms, in order to rationalize the idea that punishment and retribution is justice instead of looking for actual solutions to societal problems, and to rationalize the dehumanization of entire groups of people.

It is an obstacle to solving problems.

Antony's summary of your post is apt, whether you realize it or not.

Oh, I see. So if you don't understand it, it must be magic. If you don't agree with it, it must be condescendingly dismissed as someone making a petty attack.

I'm not going to apologize to you for treating you like a child who still believes in superstitious bull**** made up eons ago to explain things that have since been explained by actual science.

While I don't agree with the notion that evil is a supernatural force, you guys probably shouldnt be so quick to judge the beliefs of others.

Many religions have the concept of supernatural evil influencing the actions of men. If your going to respect someone's belief in god, you should probably also respect their beliefs in the existence of divine evil.

I can tolerate people's beliefs, but I certainly don't have to respect them.

I would, if he weren't a police officer.

Unambiguous evil implies the people who fight it are unimpeachably good. This is how you get tyrants.

Fair enough I guess, but then don't expect people to respect yours no matter how grounded in logic they might be.

How is evil now some magical construct? Evil is just evil. The basic definition of evil is morally wrong or bad; I think that describes this dude pretty well. He clearly had some kind of mental disorder (whether that be a documented mental condition or just a f***ed up ego) that skewed his sense of right and wrong that justified the actions he took. We humans like to think we're so much better than every other animal on the planet but we are all just animals, we all have those primal urges to get laid or be the alpha dog or whatever. How we deal with those primal urges is what makes us a superior species and a cultured society. This guy clearly wasn't mature enough to handle those primal urges and lashed out. When your own family calls the cops on you because you're being a dangerous psychopath; I think that's a pretty big red flag that you're messed up in the head.

Also on a different note, this guy killed just as many people with a knife as he did with a gun so the whole 'omg we need more gun control' debate is total BS in my book.

Evil is a nonsensical magical construct because it's a blanket explanation for an array of behaviors that morons refuse to take the time to attempt to understand on an actual scientific level.

Good and evil are the behavioral equivalent of creationism.

EDIT: And using some sort of bizarre scorecard in regard to which methods were most effective for him as an argument against gun control is ****ing astonishing.

Stop adding to my words. No where did I indicate anything supernatural. In fact, quite the opposite. I clearly stated that it was an intrinsic human trait. The word evil is probably not the best choice, because it carries with it a religious connotation. I did not mean to include those religious concepts. Rather, I tried intended to communicate (apparently poorly) the fact that every person has the capacity for those sorts of actions; however' we have learned over time to control them. It is not a supernatural force. It's our own nature. Some people just aren't able to control it.

Replace "evil" with depraved, corrupt, whatever. In no way am I implying some sort of mystical force. Short story, humans are ****ed up. Myself included.

I will craft a more thorough response when I get home and have access to a proper keyboard instead of my phone.

This is implying that morality describes something that is real (also, see 18 and 19). To attribute his actions to a mental disorder is quite a bit different from calling him evil, and also significantly more useful when it comes to solving problems (even if the cause is still more complex than just a mental disorder).

You're still just using a bunch of adjectives . I get it. Bad man is bad.

Really? I think evil describes people like Adolf Hitler and Osama bin Laden, people who use strong wills and sound minds to satisfy their malevolent self-interest. I'm deeply uncomfortable using the same word to describe severely mentally ill people, who already receive such terrible treatment in our culture that a life in prison for murder is at worst a lateral move.

You could also argue that those people were mentally ill as well.

For the first time in history I'm inclined to agree with you.

All men are bad. He decided not to control it anymore.

Does that mean that Adolf Hitler should have received care for his mental health problems? I think this conservation is becoming so abstract to the point of meaninglessness.

I'm inclined to believe that many people who do crazy, destructive things do so because they don't have much to live for.

It would be nice if there was a way to stop these people from "going out" in a violent way. I mean, if we could do that, we'd also have taken care of suicide bombers, terrorists, etc.....

Unfortunately, whether the cue comes from warlike elements of our culture and cinema, or in the case of suicide bombers, religion / politics, stopping people from wanting to go out like Scarface would be laughably improbable to think about changing. You'd have to change innumerable extant artifacts of human culture.

I mean, just watching a sporting match, or animals going at each other is inspiration thirst for conquest.

A friend of mine is fond of saying that sports are a great outlet for young male aggression, preventing people from actually carrying out an inherent male need to be violent by providing an appropriate substitute.

This is an absurdly simplistic view. Bad man just decided to let his badness fly, did he?

In order for evil to be an intrinsic human trait, a thing that just destines people to commit such acts, it really has to be something magical and supernatural.



This, right here, is really the key issue with the "evil" argument.

It's not that there's no solution, it's that by reducing your interpretation of the event to the idea that the individual themself was the sole cause of the problem, you throw away the very idea of looking for solutions.

Your attempts to explain it beyond a natural phenomenon are in vain, my friend. Bad man was bad.

For the record: police actually do have the ability to do this:


Also:


http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-isla-vista-main-20140526-story.html#page=1

The desire for love, for happiness, for justice... are those magic? This "evil" I refer to is a twisted, perverted form of something within us. Some people are just broken and don't give a ****. Consider it an extreme form of "unethical hedonism."

Your suggestion that all humans are inherently terrible is incredibly disconcerting. I will never understand why so many religious people think this way.